Sony disrespects its customers

Do not buy anything that Sony manufactures, specifically any of their bullshit copy-protected CDs. I figure all of their products deserve boycotting though.

Sony BMG installs software that hides its presence from you on your PC. It does this if you just play the CD, never mind make legal copies. Sony doesn’t get your permission. If you know what you’re doing and actually find the programme and remove it, it breaks your CD-ROM.
Crackers write viruses that behave in the same way, and in fact a virus that takes advantage of Sony’s nefarious work has already surfaced.

Disembodied Cat Person:Point 1Yes, they do deserve rootkitting. However, Sony have chosen crappy music in order to run low-load system tests on their EEBPP-Evil-Bad-Pirate-People (EEBPP) database server.

Point 2If you don’t live by principles, what is the meaning of your life?

Re: Point 1That they have. And now it’s been splashed across the front pages for the last two months. I doubt Sony BMG’s management are so daft as to sit down at their next board meeting and say “Oh, gee, that experiment worked well, let’s put this on ALL our CDs”.

Re: Point 2Of course I live by principles. But I’m also a realist. I have a technocentric job and life, both of which rely to some degree on the quality of Sony’s (non-music) products. Boycotting them because they made one dumbass move which they’re already regretting in spades is like never eating apples again because you got one bad one.

Incidentally, your principles link is a 404 ;-). I suspect the one you meant was probably this one.

I actually thought of a counter-argument to what I said right after I posted it, namely that it isn’t the apple tree’s fault that the apple was bad. Arguably in the case of big business screwing over the consumer, that is the case; it isn’t quite an, a-haha, apples to apples comparison.

I say “arguably”, since these days corporations on the scale of people like Sony are so huge and diverse that the right hand not knowing what the left hand’s up to is more the rule than the exception. It’s no excuse I know, but I’d be more comfortable dissing on Sony BMG for being nefarious turds, rather than the company as a whole 🙂

No idea about the link, that’s rather weird if it wasn’t just a typo. Must be the bloody alien sasquatches again (puts on his tinfoil hat)…